Washington watch

Barack Obama may have fended off economic disaster, passed a health bill and agreed nuclear arms cuts with Russia, but this recent string of achievements has done nothing for his popularity. Opinion polls predict him being beaten in 2012 by any generic Republican, by 42.6 per cent to 40.7 per cent, and his approval/disapproval ratings are running neck and neck. There is, however, one Democrat with a favourability rating of 61 per cent: Hillary Clinton. She is much more popular now than when running for president, despite not being prominent on big foreign policy issues. But that may be to her advantage, since she has not been in the Republican/Fox News line of fire, which is focused on Obama. Newt Gingrich calls him “the most radical president in American history.” Rush Limbaugh claims he’s “inflicting untold damage on this great country” and Sarah Palin says his nuclear policy is “like a kid who says punch me in the face.” Obama’s real test will be the November midterms, in which all 435 congressional districts are up for re-election plus just over a third of senate seats. The Democrats are bracing for losses, but growing confident that they will cling to narrow majorities in both houses. Two key senate seats now look safe, after former governors and Republican big beasts George Pataki (New York) and Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin) decided not to run. The Dems think that, at worst, they could lose seven senate seats, leaving them a tiny majority of 52. And they have hopes of holding two or three of those if the economy continues to improve. Dems have also been cheered by their success in holding Florida’s 19th congressional district in a special election. In a seat filled with retirees, healthcare reform was the big issue and the Republicans thought they could pull off an upset by telling elderly voters that their Medicare was under threat. But Democrat Ted Deutch won with 62 per cent of the vote, running on strong support for the Obama bill. Healthcare isn’t done yet Health reform, however, may not be a done deal. Attorneys-general in 18 Republican-held states are mounting a legal challenge against the reforms as unconstitutional—which means the issue is likely to go to the supreme court, still dominated by the conservative justices installed under Bush. The states argue that the new law strips them of their right to determine who will get Medicaid coverage within their borders, while sticking them with part of the tab. They also claim that the individual requirement for people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional: “Nowhere in the constitution is congress given the power to mandate that an individual enter into a contract with a private party or purchase a good or service,” they insist. Obama’s lawyers counter that they are covered by the powers granted in the constitution to govern interstate commerce. But this is tricky, since congress has repeatedly refused to allow health insurance companies to compete across state lines. Given that Obama has to replace retiring supreme court justice John Paul Stevens, the Republicans are planning to make the issue their litmus test in the senate confirmation hearings. Labour lost Obama has lost his top union supporter. Andy Stern has stepped down as head of the 2.2m-strong Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which reportedly raised $60.7m (£39m) to elect him and was the biggest supporter of his healthcare bill. The most successful labour leader of his generation, Stern doubled the membership of the SEIU and made it the world’s fastest-growing union. To earn his endorsement, Democratic candidates had to spend a day working alongside one of his union members. “Change is inevitable, progress is optional,” was Stern’s motto. His greatest coup came in 2007, when he persuaded Walmart to offer decent health insurance to its employees. Yet Stern’s departure may lead to a more united labour movement. In 2005, he formed the coalition Change to Win, which seeks to end the decline of union power by relentless organising. But he did so by leading six unions representing 6m workers out of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of unions. Change to Win is unlikely to survive Stern’s retirement. The new AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, from the mineworkers’ union, is working to heal the breach in the labour movement. Colin Powell’s iPad Gadget-freak Colin Powell, an Apple fan who is never separated from his iPhone, received an iPad for his 73rd birthday and whips it out at every opportunity. He’s already loaded it with the plans he helped draft for the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, with the tank-thrust arrows and helicopter strikes moving eerily across the screen. Powell has joined Facebook (he has around 23,000 fans) and says his next step is Twitter. His tweets will thus be housed in the national archive, since the Library of Congress is to store all public tweets since March 2006, including the Obama campaign’s famous “yes, we did!” victory tweet on election night. Palin: the last straws If money talks, Sarah Palin will not be running for president in 2012. She has made a personal fortune of $12m since stepping down as Alaska governor in July 2009, but only raised $400,000 this year for SarahPAC, her political action committee. (In contrast, Mitt Romney has raised $1.5m.) Thanks to Palin’s contract for public appearances being found in a bin, we now know she gets $100,000 a speech and requires first-class airfare for two (or a private aircraft, “a Lear 60 or larger”), plus three rooms at a luxury hotel and two water bottles at the lectern with bendy straws.